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The
Martha's Vineyard Times is a weekly publication.
March 3 - March 9, 2005 Edition
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FILM March 3, 2005 There is no film column this week. Two movies mix travel, politics February 17, 2005 By Brooks Robards Two very different films with political themes will be shown on the Vineyard this month by the Silver Screen Society. “Divine Intervention” on Feb. 19 portrays the difficulties for Palestinians living in Israeli-occupied territory. The second, “Motorcycle Diaries,” is based on revolutionary Che Guevara's South American road trip and will be shown Feb. 26.Romance and absurdity Elia Suleiman won the 2002 Best Director's prize at Cannes for “Divine Intervention.” The movie follows the ups and downs of the lives of Palestinians and Israelis living cheek by jowl. If the movie has any consistent narrative thread, it tells the story of a woman (Manal Kadher) and her lover, E.S. (Suleiman), as they try to meet even though one lives in Jerusalem and the other in Ramallah. Using an absurdist, black-comedy approach, Suleiman builds his film like a series of blackout sketches with almost no dialogue. The film opens with a group of boys chasing an unidentified man in a Santa Claus suit. Next, we see a man standing next to his car smoking a cigarette. As he drives along, he waves to his neighbors while muttering curses under his breath. Another waits at a bus stop, only to be told the bus isn't coming. Yet another man tosses garbage onto his neighbor's roof garden. We also watch E.S.'s father sit in his kitchen eating or reading the paper. Many of the vignettes are repeated with variations. In this manner, we are introduced to life in an occupied community. Nothing makes sense, and the only sane response for the audience is to laugh. Periodic scenes at the border checkpoint, where traffic jams seem to occur at the whim of the guards stationed there, reinforce the notion of life as an absurdist joke. The couple, who meet in a parking lot next to the checkpoint, are the only characters in the movie who seem to be trying to make something out of the mess their world is in. The audience will have to decide whether they - and the director - succeed. On the road with Che Walter Salles, the Brazilian director of “Central Station” and “Dark Water,” an about-to-be-released American thriller, takes a far more conventional and lyrical approach to filmmaking in “The Motorcycle Diaries.” His road movie details the political awakening of Che Guevara, who came from a middle-class Argentinean family, went to medical school, then stopped out to take a trip across South America with a friend and ultimately became a revolutionary. The screenplay is adapted from Guevara's 1953 diaries, discovered and published in 1993, and his traveling companion Alberto Granado's book, “Traveling with Che Guevara.” Gael Garcia Bernal, the young actor who has built his reputation in films like “Amores Perros,” “Y Tu Mama Tambien” and Almadovar's “Bad Education,” plays the young Ernesto “Che” Guevara de la Serna. Rodriguo de la Serna plays his traveling pal, Alberto. What begins with a farewell visit to his ready-to-be-married girlfriend and an idyll through the South American countryside turns into an introduction to political realities for Guevara, who became Latin America's most famous radical. An important interlude occurs when the two young doctors-to-be volunteer at a leper colony and begin to develop a social consciousness. Guevara gives the last of his money to a farmer couple displaced by capitalist landowners. Alberto, the more happy-go-lucky, womanizing opportunist of the two, ends up practicing medicine in Castro's Cuba. Salles doesn't load the film with didactic discussions of political theory. In fact, the movie has been accused of overromanticizing Che as a figure who was more repressive than revolutionary. That charge seems to miss the mark. The marvel is that a fiction film about a figure like Guevara got made at all in an era where politics have taken such a sharp turn to the radical right. Salles's light touch makes “The Motorcycle Diaries” a nostalgic tribute to the way the openness of youth solidifies into something far more serious. By the end of “The Motorcycle Diaries,” Guevara commits himself to a united Latin America. However you judge Guevara's politics as a mature man, you cannot fault the idealism of the young man.“Divine Intervention,” Saturday, Feb. 19; “Motorcycle Diaries,” Saturday, Feb. 26 at Katharine Cornell Theatre, Spring St., Vineyard Haven, 7:30 pm. Tickets: $6 and $4 for members. Call 508-696-9369 for more information.Brooks Robards taught film for 20 years at Westfield State College. She has published 10 books, 3 of which are poetry, and frequently writes about film for The Times. |
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